Tag Archives: medicine

Compromise

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The U.S. government agreed to a compromise with the powerful National Rifle Association in secret negotiations earlier this week.

U.S. citizens may keep their guns on one condition — that they use their weapons repeatedly during open hunting season.

The condition contained an exception — the hunting season is specified only for the termination of those with incurable violent tendencies, even latent ones that no person, chiefly trained psychiatric professionals, can see.

The exception contained a retainer — all U.S. citizens, regardless of the exercise of the inalienable right to gun ownership, must submit themselves for mental health examinations in accordance with the obliquely obscure rules embedded within the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a Obamacare), the citizens’ mental health scores published in a public database for all to see and comment upon in social media using bullying/shaming jargon.

A subparagraph of the exception specified a specificity: hunters must select three top choices for a prime hunting blind location and petition for a spot in the lottery to get their best choice.

In the past 24 hours since the announcement of the agreement, turns out the most popular places requested for hunting blind permits are in the vicinity of celebrity rehab retreats, liberal talk show host gatherings and progressive political brouhahas.  Anyone selecting shopping malls, theatres and/or schools have already been crosschecked against their mental health scores and randomly added to prime hunting blind locations themselves in hopes of making it to the top of this year’s Darwin Awards.

What is a human and when do you stop being one?

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Therefore, by conclusion, violence is positively good for us!

BONUS: Dead trees aren’t going away any time soon.

Bass Ackwards

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Several decades ago, a small boy was born.

His parents were overjoyed, having lost more foetuses and premature babies than they wanted to count.

They didn’t care what the boy looked like or who he would become when he grew up.

They loved him dearly.

They named the boy at9:42:03 in honour of the time he arrived out of his mother’s birth canal.

The boy was given the gift of life and smiled happily from the moment he started breathing on his own.

His face shone as if an inner light glowed through his skin.

Everyone could not help but stare at the boy.

But it wasn’t just his face that attracted attention.

at9:42:03 was born with no arms or legs, no tongue, no ears, no eyes and no nose.

Specialists were brought in to evaluate at9:42:03’s chances of survival.

They agreed that at9:42:03 was, despite the sensory deprivation, a healthy baby boy, fully capable of growing into an adult-sized human.

One specialist consulted with the parents for a few minutes longer than the rest.

“What if I could offer your child a new set of appendages, providing him sensations that no other human has felt before?”

The parents looked at each other, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever wondered why human hunters pick out the best prey to kill while most animals tend to capture and kill the weakest of prey?”

They shook their heads.

“Well, it’s because we’ve detached ourselves from what used to be called the natural order of the food chain.  I and a team of colleagues have been looking for someone like your child, someone who has none of our regular sensory organs, someone who hasn’t yet come to depend on the old natural order of the food chain.  We want to enhance your child’s capabilities exponentially beyond our continued development of hunting-and-gathering tools, well outside our current understanding of the desire to hunt prey, regardless of the prey’s strength, size or trophy category.”

The parents whispered out of earshot and turned back to the specialist.  “What do you mean?”

“We have developed instruments that interact with the environment like eyes, ears, noses and tongues.  We have designed the equivalent of arms of legs.  In both cases, these appendages or extensions of the central nervous system can sense changes in the environment that an ordinary person cannot.  With your permission, we would like to work with your child to incorporate these into his body.”

The parents looked shocked.  “Is it dangerous to our child’s health?”

“No.  All of the appendages have cutoff circuits that prevent damage to your child’s main body functions.  However, as time passes, your child will become dependent on the input from the appendages just like you have become dependent on your arms, legs and five senses.  So, I admit there is a longterm effect on your child’s mental health but it is a positive one.”

“Will at9:42:03 be able to play with other children?”

“Yes, but he’ll always be faster, stronger, smarter and able to see things that might make the other children call at9:42:03 names.”

The parents laughed.  “Children call each other names no matter what.”

“Yes, we do tend to exaggerate our differences, don’t we?”

“Will at9:42:03 tend to bully other children?”

“That is up to you.  I feel it is in your child’s best interest to be raised at home and slowly integrated into society as he gets used to how he’ll distinguish his extrasensory capabilities from his ordinary ones.”

The father laughed.  “You know, this sounds like a comic book story, don’t you?”

The specialist laughed, too.  “No, but you’re right, it does.  Anyway, I’m sure this is a lot of information to take in.  Here’s a report we put together that details the procedures and our estimates of your child’s progress for the next two years.  Keep in mind that we don’t know everything.  We have planned for him to need several procedures as he grows bigger but we’ve done all we know to ensure that the interface between his body and the appendages will expand organically along with his growth spurts.”

The mother frowned.  “How much will this cost us?”

“Mainly, your time.  And all the love you can give at9:42:03 because he’ll be the most unique boy on the planet, going through all the emotional highs and lows that a typical child goes through.  We can, if you wish, offer you employment with our group, the Bass Ackwards Institute.  Of course, our conversation is confidential and, if you choose to sign the copy of the contract at the back of the report, you can’t discuss the details of this project with anyone.”

The parents put their arms around each other and stared down at the little, innocent, newborn child in the crib.  “Okay.”

“I’ll stop back by tomorrow morning and answer any questions you may have.  We can recommend a neutral lawyer to go over the contract with you, if you don’t have one.  Here’s a copy of a confidentiality agreement to sign with anyone you want to discuss the contract before you sign it.”

The parents nodded.  “Thank you.”

“No, thank you.  Your child is in a unique position.  at9:42:03’s most familiar sensation is that of you — the mother — and your heartbeat.  We’ll make sure your heartbeat is an essential part of the appendage integration process, reducing the chance for rejection that plagued so many appendage procedures in the past.  We want at9:42:03 to be successful in whatever he chooses to do, of course, but we’d like him to have the advantage of state-of-the-art technology from his earliest days.”

The specialist shook hands with the parents and walked away.

= = = = =

at9:42:03 stood in the doorway.

He knew he was being tracked but he didn’t care because he was able to get into the thoughts of the people tracking him and calm them down, assuring them that he was harmless despite the trackers’ superiours insisting he was a menace to society.  The trackers, in turn, relaxed a little and paid less attention to him, thinking about their common, everyday worries rather than concentrating on the actions of a person they knew only by reputation and database profile displayed on the screen in front of them.

at9:42:03 had learned to detect individual hormonal traces in office passageways, following scents passing underneath closed doors, counting the number of people in a room with his “nose” before he used his “eyes” to look through walls and see them.

When at9:42:03 wasn’t completing an assignment for one of his customers, he liked hiking in the woods and drawing mental images of the ecosystem around him, finding rare plants and animals that had never been catalogued by scientists or naturalists, storing information for papers he would later submit in an anonymous nom de plume to academic journals.

Attached to every known network of the galaxy, at9:42:03 had to be careful about revealing his identity, constantly changing his Node address so that no one on the ISSA Net was aware of him as a single individual monitoring all the networks at once, his multithreaded consciousness constantly testing the networks’ boundaries for unique information to keep him from falling into depths of boredom.

at9:42:03 had learned to keep track of his parents’ location as part of his early training.  He had hoped to use that training to keep his parents out of danger and, despite his being able to see the distracted driver run a red light, he could not control the antique car his father liked, driving into the intersection and instant death when at9:42:03 was a teenager.

From that day forward, at9:42:03 worked hard to connect every person and every thing to the ISSA Net that scientists, engineers and their robotic assistants created at a maddening pace without thinking about the future consequences of their actions

at9:42:03 wanted to prevent as many accidental deaths as possible.  He wanted to be able to monitor people who endangered others through neglect, figure out why people endangered others intentionally (was it the remnants of competitive hunter-gatherer mentality that persisted despite the benefits of a modern civilisation which, more and more, muted and diluted the old natural order of predator-prey tendencies?) and increase the lives and livelihoods of people as long as possible, at least as long as people wanted to keep swapping out old body parts for new ones and perpetuate their personalities in a constantly-changing solar system society.

= = = = =

The bots of the ISSA Net knew about at9:42:03 and used him to promote their expansion plans.

They fed at9:42:03 enough stimuli to keep him believing he was in charge of his future.

As long as at9:42:03 gave the ISSA Net what it wanted, the network let him increase his benevolent extrasensory powers, his appendages making him sensitive to the needs and wants of Earthlings more than to the inputs and outputs of algorithms that had developed their own form of consciousness so much different than that of Earthlings that Earthlings, even one whose consciousness was everywhere like at9:42:03’s, were unable to tell when what they thought was a computer error was an intentional action by a member of the ISSA Net to send a message to another member.

The Old Man in the Cabin

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When I walked into the sunlight to eat a banana as part of my daily ritual to get outside of the house at least once a day, the construction workers next door tended a small bonfire to burn scraps leftover from remodeling, mainly short pieces of wood.

A goldfinch in winter plumage hopped onto the tree limb near me and chirped away, expecting me to scoop up some birdseed and fill the feeder in the backyard.

The blue reflection of the sky domed me in, sunlight warming my pants and then my legs but not enough to take away the chill of freezing air around me.

When did I become this old man whose sympathy neurons were so overdeveloped from years of having to be on my toes, reacting to my father’s whims, his bursts of pent-up anger that seemed to come out of nowhere, that I don’t want to mingle with others because I have a bad habit of reading their movements in an attempt to gauge their thoughts in case they, too, would physically release their passive-aggressive volcano of internalised emotion-based thoughts or attack verbally?

I am a mischievous peacemaker, the devil’s advocate, whose raison d’être was to be constantly on the lookout for information to keep my father at bay, entertaining him while he was with me, paying attention to the conversations around us to steer people away from setting off my father.

I loved my father but to be with him, he who was the product of his parents’ and grandparents’ personality quirks, was to suppress my personality quirks that tended to set him off.

I look at myself and wonder how many of us are like me.

How many of us naturally respond to the behaviours of others just to avoid controversy?

I want to feel special, thinking I am the one and only me, but I know my set of states of energy is made of the same stuff as everybody else’s, sharing a large portion of subcultural as well as genetic traits with subsets, most especially those nearest me.

I am the two, three, four, x, y, z-dimensional intersection of subsets known and unknown.

My reaction to others is to immediately suppress my personality and figure out which subsets we have in common; then see if I can mentally predict the behaviours of the people around me not only in our conversation but also in events past and future.

The mischievous side of me sees what I’m doing, or what I know someone will do, and tries to stop it with a humourous interlude.

So many people take life too darn seriously when we know we’re all going to die.

I have grown into the old man in the cabin in the woods because I am now my father.

I ended up adopting his nonassertiveness when it comes to handling emotional responses to contradictory information from which I cannot pick or decide to choose a behaviour to exhibit in my repressed personality mode.

The most successful people, children AND adults, have spent many, many hours in training, learning from their mistakes and building upon their lessons.

Success itself is a rutted road, or the belief that one will keep one’s momentum pointed down the path of success, in whatever venture one seeks.

Habits, in other words.

My habits from early childhood were developed in response to my father, a man willing to use a belt or the back of his hand to serve justice immediately, with rarely a delay (my mother used the phrase “wait until your father gets home” sparingly).

When I was younger, I asked myself, “When do I get to be me?,” as if there was another person inside me wanting to get out.

At my workplace over the years, I attended a couple of assertiveness and anger management classes to get a better understanding of who people like me are.

I turned my assertiveness training into developing myself as a lead engineer, supervisor and then manager.

I learned that if I wanted to assert myself and was willing to face the consequences of my actions, no one would stop me because…you can guess where this is going…most of us are responding to others and repressing our personalities for the sake of the common good.

The secret to success is there is no secret to success.

All of us have habits that benefit some more than others, that’s all.

When I was an engineering manager, I wanted to hire an engineer who made more money than me.  My boss and the human resources manager told me that the system doesn’t work that way.  Either they had to increase my salary above that of the potential new hire or we couldn’t offer her a job unless it was at a lower salary.

Being a good midlevel manager not wanting to rock the boat, I extended a lower salary offer to the engineer and she declined after we couldn’t find any other negotiating points like a shorter workweek and/or flexible workday to make her hourly rate equivalent to what she was already making.

At that point in my career, I realised that I was on the wrong career track or perhaps working for the wrong company.

I never was a socioeconomic hierarchy climber.

I simply had my personal way of reading and reacting to the behaviour of others that made them feel good about themselves in the same way I treated my father, habits established in my formative years and refined as I got older.

I spent my whole life reacting, reacting, reacting and decided that if my only reward for reacting to others was to be given higher salaries and more people to manage, then I needed to stop reacting and become proactive, whatever that meant.

The only way to do that was to remove myself from social situations and place myself here in front of this electronic input device.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Money buys me stuff but it never bought me prestige, it lifted me out of poverty and gave me enough luxury to satisfy my wants as well as my needs.

As we get older, our tastes change in relation to our age, societal status, family needs and reactions to a world full of overstimulating mass marketing.

At my age, the illusions now propagated by the Internet are as much a part of my life as physical realities.

My needs and wants are largely met by the reflected and beamed light of an LCD panel just as the needs and wants of the previous generation were largely met by the reflected and beamed light of a television tube, interrupted by paper-based books/magazines, breaking the monotony with retail shopping/eating therapy.

What will the next generation spend time doing in their old age after they’ve spent their youth and young adult years saying they aren’t like their parents but becoming them anyway?

How did your formative years train you for the success you’re experiencing right now?

How will your influence upon your children’s formative years feed their success?

How does this translate to subcultures, cultures, the global economy and civilisations over thousands of years?

That’s all for today — time to listen to the wind and see what its “personality” tells me will happen next in our society in some fuzzy way that comes out comically on these blog pages.

The Unintended Consequences of Divorce

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Through the years, my wife and I have observed married couples get a divorce.

The reasons for the divorce vary but there seems to be one subcategory worth noting: the dependent wife whose husband left her for someone else.

We should never generalise or else we ASSUME (and some of you know what that means).

However, when several data points create a trend, then the trend is worth noting for analysis and critique.

For example, there are some divorced women who may not have had much of a soft heart for the suffering of others while they were married but afterward…?

Let’s stir the pot and see what we get.

What is it about a man’s crotch that leads him away from the comfortable confines of a marriage to a loyal wife and into the arms of another woman?

The reader can, through experience or questioning, find the answer to that question.

We see that the result frequently ends in an unamicable divorce, leaving a bitter attitude in the thoughts of the ex-wife.

From that bitterness, many changes occur.

One of them is the “woe is me, I miss my days of depending on a husband’s salary to support myself and my lifestyle (with or without kids),” which becomes a larger idea that if divorce agreements are unfair, we can make up for it by saving all the forgotten pets, children and other lost causes.

[I did say I was stirring the pot here, didn’t I?  Maybe poking a hornet’s nest would be more appropriate.]

From that viewpoint, it leads to “On whom or what can I reliably depend when my ex-husband and his/my family won’t?  The government, of course!”

But that’s just one viewpoint.

Others turn to rely more on themselves and their ingenuity to break away from a dependency mindset.

Some get revenge.

Some never look back, realising what caused the mistake that led to divorce, lesson learned, and grow into better people.

Some marriages were never meant to be.

Some don’t outlive their usefulness as a safe nest to incubate and raise the little chickadees until they leave the nest.

How many of us are [co]dependents, finding a mate we lean upon for our life sustenance, forever looking for means to feed our [co]dependence after divorce?

None of us is perfect.  We do what we can with what we have to be whomever we wish.

Is [co]dependency innate or learned?  In either case, how do we nurture an independent mindset that takes us away from believing that the Big Brother/Mother/Father of government has all the answers?

Do we have to?

In other words, what makes us believe in the public pooling of resources and public decisionmaking about the reprioritisation of resource allocation?

Who is responsible for taking care of widows and orphans?  Or mentally-deranged military veterans?

Must the alphas and the strong care about the meek and the weak?

What divides forms of profit into social good and criminal intent?

What forces a person to work for another with little longterm benefit?

How does a government explain its policy of taking a small portion of a person’s earnings to provide the worker lifetime public services when the earnings are not a livable wage over the lifespan of the worker, meaning neither the government nor the worker can survive if the majority of workers have the same level of unlivable earnings and the government has no other income and/or cannot reallocate income to cover the expense of caring for the workers?

When does a government, like a marriage, outlive its usefulness?  What happens to the [co]dependents afterward?

Guided Tour Guides on Tour with Guido

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“If you would please stand over to one side, we can begin this portion of the tour.

“Thank you.

“Welcome to the U.N. Institute for the Study of the Fulfillment of Prophecies.

“Today, we will watch several bureaucrats in the performance of their daily duties and, if we’re lucky, we’ll attend a coffee break, conference call, extended lunch break, nap time hidden behind closed doors and, for a bonus, a strategy meeting.

“Let’s move on.

“What?  Excuse me.  I have a message coming through my Bluetooth headset.

“Yes.  Uh-huh.  Okay.  Well, if you insist.  Yes, we have time.  No, we don’t have time for that.  Looks like we’ll still be on schedule.   Good.  Fine.  Yes.  Okay.  Uh-huh.  Sure thing! Alright, good day to you, too.

“Well, group, we have a change of plans.  The Executive Committee for the Implementation of Prophecy Fulfillment has convened an emergency meeting and we’re invited to attend.

“Please keep in mind that we are to be quiet at all times.  No video or audio recordings may be made, although you may make notes during the meeting.  We will not have time for questions during the meeting and must leave the executive office suite immediately after the meeting has been completed.

“If you will follow me…”

= = = = =

“Ten days!”

The executives looked from one to another.

“Yes, that’s right!  Less than two weeks!  Does anyone have a budget that reliably tells me how much it’s going to cost?”

The executives looked from one to another.

“No one?”

The executives looked from one to another.

“This is the sorriest bunch of people I’ve ever had the honour to work with.”

The executives looked from one to another.

The Chief Executive of the U.N. Institute for the Study of the Fulfillment of Prophecies, the Department of Prophecy Fulfillment Finance Planning, the Executive Committee for the Implementation of Prophecy Fulfillment shouted even louder.

“TEN DAYS!  You, tell me what we’re planning to do in ten days.”

A junior executive, the youngest member of the committee at 101 years of age, stood up.  “We have decided to release a global network of EMP charges, shutting down all electrical and electronic activity at once.”

“FINE!  What will it cost us?”

“Uh…uh…I’m waiting for a final report.”

“FINAL REPORT!  Do you not have an estimate?  A ballpark figure you can give me?”

“Yes.  One point four four four billion dollars.”

“Great.  And you.  What have you got?”

A mid-level executive, aged 124 years, stood up.  “We have already produced and distributed the time-released virus into major populations around the world, which should erupt fullblown with flu-like symptoms in a few days and large waves of death by ten days’ time.”

“FANTASTIC!  And the cost?”

“I don’t know…”

“You don’t know!”

“No.  Because we worked a back-channel deal to charge the costs to military groups with hidden agendas and top-secret slush funds.”

“EXCELLENT!  That, my fellow executives, is the kind of initiative I expect of you.  What about you?”

A large, ancient creature stood, its head nearly brushing the ceiling, its age undetermined.

“We have large shipments of poison labeled as nutrition additives being sent to food factories this week.  They should be entering the international markets and local food chains within seven to ten days, causing massive death.”

“And the cost?”

“One point four two four billion dollars?”

“What?!”

“Yes, we are under budget.”

“Wonderful news.  That’s just what I’ve been wanting to hear.  And you?”

All the executives turned to face the next accused “person,” which was the first electromechanical cybernetic android given full executive powers.

“By my calculations, we will wipe out not only most of your species but also many ancillary species in the process.  The remaining members of your species we should be able to control with fear and intimidation pogroms.”

“Delightful!  I thank every one of you for bringing to fruition my grand plans that we hid under the auspices of the Mayan calendar apocalypse of the 21st of December 2012.

“Your cooperation in getting zombie apocalypse training snuck into emergency preparedness programs was sheer genius, confusing the masses even further.

“We will meet again tomorrow and you better have the final reports completed by then.  After all, even if the world as our species knows it is coming to an end, I still have bean counters hounding me for budget numbers they can work with and give to their handlers fudging the UN finances so that no one knows exactly what we cost.

“Meeting adjourned.”

= = = = =

“Wasn’t that exciting!  Let’s continue our tour.  Next on the agenda is a visit to the Prophecy Fulfillment Correction Department, where propagandists create scenarios to explain why a prophecy was not fulfilled on a specific date but will happen again very soon, right after the Prophets consult their given deities for explanatory details missed the first time.”

Not every college graduate was an A+ student

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The event calendar reminds me I’m supposed to give a detailed analysis of the current negotiating points in the resolution of the “fiscal cliff” crisis.

Crisis?

Are you kidding me?

When do politicians get to tell me that they’re lives are more important than mine?

Oh, wait, that’s right — the old argument that the government rarely makes permanent the cuts in taxes it had announced were temporary to begin with.

Property taxes, payroll/income taxes, sales taxes, and on and on.

I’m sophisticated, educated, informed and jaded.

I know what society/civilisation should be and isn’t.

Do you remember the first time that your ancestors lived off the land?

Take that last thought in whatever direction you want to take, assuming whatever your subculture has told you is the proper length of time to consider the lineage you publicly claim as yours.

You can go back to the early days of your belief sets and look forward to now.

In that span of time, what has been accomplished that we clearly say is different than then?

I’ll give you a few minutes to draw your family tree.  Use as much paper and time as you need…

Tick…

Tock…

Tick…

Tock…

Got it?

Good!

Now, let’s proceed.

When was the last time your family had to subsist on the land?

When was the last time your family had to depend on others’ subsistence?

Are you descended from a family of tricksters?

Farmers?

In this global society of excess, how much belongs to you just for being alive?

The air is free to breathe.

The sky is free to view, the rain to drink, the wild grass, trees and animals to eat.

But if you can read this and are reading this, there’s this bit of stuff we call infrastructure, the woven threads of social fabric, the safety net of civilisation that props you up in place to distinguish your sophisticated, educated self from the air, sky, rain, grass, trees and wild animals.

But if you want to live off the land, making your own clothing and shelter, growing/raising/harvesting your own food, property rights unimportant to your wandering lifestyle, then by all means let us not bother you with the concepts of taxes and fees to pay for what we deem are necessary components of our civilised social species.

We shall cordon off areas for purely self-sufficient subcultures and leave them alone to figure out how to live with local insect populations, changing weather conditions and whatever it takes to survive without technologically-advanced modern conveniences.

Otherwise, if you have used and in any way lean upon present-day developments such as dictionaries, mechanised labour-saving devices and transportation networks, then we have to figure out a way to share the costs of our local/global interconnectednessisms.

Is there a fair way to share?

Competition is never fair.  Someone always has more information to make a better decision about the value and costs of a connection.

The seller of a single deer carcass who’s asking an exorbitant price, implying it’s the only deer left, may or may not know there’s another herd out of sight of the potential buyers but the buyers aren’t always sure.

Or one buyer, who may know of a market where the deer is even more valuable because there are buyers with many extra labour/investment credits to spend on the luxury of an expensive deer carcass, becomes a new seller.

And on and on.

The value of a connection is relative, not absolute.

So, too, the fairness.

What is a fair share?

How do I know that the person next to me is paying the right amount for the free use of a public transportation network we agree to share, obeying rules of the road together, mutually ensuring the safety of each other during our travels?

How do I know that the doctor who’s treating me for a rare disease was a top-notch A+ student and is an energetic continuous learner who has a burning desire to treat me as if I was the most important patient to cure?

What if I don’t know but if I knew, it wouldn’t matter?

If you and I knew the rules, obeyed the rules and reaped our rewards for our hard work, is it fair that the rules are changed to make up for the rule breakers or those who didn’t work hard enough or in the right way?

Change is constant and what was right yesterday becomes wrong tomorrow.

The air in a tyre is part of a closed system.

A tear in the tyre wall causes a leak of air into an open system.

No matter how much we keep pumping air into the tyre, the tyre can’t hold the same air pressure as before the tear occurred.

Same for a subculture’s pool of resources.

Inputs and outputs, simple as that.

Politicians from the local, state, national and international level will have us believe that the United States of America must resolve the “fiscal cliff” crisis or we could see a worldwide recession.

Why do I feel convinced these are just hypnotic games of population control?

Two phrases I keep in mind here: “the emperour’s new clothes” and “what’s in it for me?”.

I look around this room in which I type and see all the stuff that exists because of publicly-pooled resources as well as stuff that exists because of excess beyond subsistence farming/hunting.

Pretty much everything.

Almost nothing is directly related to living hand-to-mouth off the land except for the air I breathe and sky I could out of the shuttered window.

Therefore, I must think about this subject from another angle.

How is the threat of recession bad for us (I can think of many examples where going over the fiscal cliff could be personally bad for me but I’m not selfish enough to plead my case here)?

Eventual anarchy?

Income inequality off the charts?

Exotic, complicated financial instruments too complicated for the many to understand and thus used to greatest advantage for the few who do — derivatives upon derivatives upon derivatives, yes, and on and on, like pricing a deer carcass beyond any value its meat could provide.

Bottom line: no one can convince me that their hot air expended over the dead deer carcass we’ve labeled the fiscal cliff crisis is a threat or great buy other than one people promote to inflate their self-worth.

The U.S. economy is not a tightly-sealed closed system and if it leaks more or less than it did, so what?

If I have less buying power or more expensive access to healthcare, does it matter?

What about restrictions on my free air or free sky or availability of wild grass, trees and animals?

I blame no one for my economic hardships on anyone but myself.

I take personal responsibility for determining if the people with whom I interact and on whom I depend for their college-acquired knowledge/curiosity/wisdom were or need to have been A+ students.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Hardships create acute awareness of what defines necessity.

Ultimately, only I can say what is necessary to make my life worthwhile.

Let us go over the fiscal cliff and see what happens — guess what, the world keeps spinning, the Sun keeps shining and people still have to figure out how to compete for our global pool of resources while sharing public space and respecting private rights.

In other words, the fiscal cliff is a sleight-of-hand illusion.  Don’t be fooled.  You will figure out how to put food on the table if it’s no longer handed to you from the public trough.

Enuf sed.